For decades, there’s been a gender truism about religion in America: Women are more religious than men. It’s science! Or, at least, it was. But new research says that the times, they are changing. And these days, young men are more likely to be religious than young women.
Ryan Burge has written an interesting data analysis at Christianity Today, and he found that while older women are certainly more likely to be religious than older men, the gap shrinks a little with every generation before vanishing with millennials and then completely flipping with the zoomers. Now, there’s no denying it. Women born after 2000 are more likely to be a “religious none” than a man is. Among 18-25 year olds, 49 percent of women are nones. Just 46 percent of men say the same.
It holds true in church attendance too, according to Burge, who found that the percentage of women in their 20s who say they “never attend” religious services is higher than the percentage of men who say the same.
We don’t know exactly why this is. That said, it’s worth noting that the last few decades of declining male church attendance sparked a inter-denominational panic, with churches and Christian publishers across the country launching men’s ministries and publishing books about how to make your church manly enough to get men back in the door.
Generally speaking, the rapid decline of religiosity in the U.S. would suggest such ministries may not have been very successful at wooing more men, but one can speculate that at least a few women saw the heavy focus on male ministries as a sign that they weren’t the target audience.
